When Larry Holmes beat Randall "Tex" Cobb to a bloody pulp in a 1982 heavyweight championship fight, Howard Cosell was so horrified that he swore he'd never announce another professional fight. The Holmes-Cobb fight came less than two weeks after Duk Koo Kim died of brain trauma after fighting Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, and Cosell, the most prominent sports broadcast journalist of his era, kept his word. (He did announce the 1984 Olympic boxing matches for ABC.)

Cobb reacted with his usual dry wit.

"Hey, if it gets him to stop broadcasting NFL games, I'll go play football for a week," he said.

What's ironic about Cobb's comment is that when he made it there was no public discussion about brain injuries in football. Safety issues in boxing are obvious, and reforms have been instituted and laws passed, even as traditional boxing has declined in popularity and the more violent, less regulated mixed martial arts have surged.

So what to do? Ignore the obvious brain-rattling that happens on pretty much every set of downs? Say that these guys know the risks and are being paid to take them? Say that it's their problem, and don't bother me while I'm watching the game?

Almond doesn't shy away from making a moral argument, that everyone who watches NFL games (by far the most popular sport on TV), is supporting an activity that causes brain damage to its participants. He goes beyond concussions to include the sport's misogynistic, homophobic culture (and finds plenty of ammunition in the Richie Incognito and Ray Rice incidents), and moves from there to the implicit racism at the heart of the NFL experience.

"What is the relationship between our nation's racial history and our lust for football?" Almond asks. "What does it mean that football fever tends to run so hot in those states where slavery was legal and Jim Crow died hardest? What does it mean that millions of white fans cheer wildly for African American men in the context of a football game when, if they encountered these same men on a darkened street, they might very well reach nervously for their cell phone?"

Almond goes on to wonder how anyone can watch the NFL Combine -- "in which young, mostly African American men are made to run and jump and lift weights for the benefit of mostly old white coaches" -- and not see "visual echoes of the slave auction."

Mark Edmundson, a teacher at the University of Virginia and a cultural critic, takes a more personal approach in "Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game." Like Almond, who went to some length to declare himself a football fan (the Raiders), Edmundson came to the game in an attempt to bond with his father. Unlike Almond, Edmundson went out for his high-school team and transformed himself from "a buttery, oversensitive boy, credulous and shy" to someone "with a strong will and clear desires," "alert and ready to move."

"When a boy is trying to grow up, football can be a form of education that works when no others can," Edmundson writes. "The boy will listen to his coach and his teammates when he won't listen to anyone else. What he'll develop is what I began to develop on the rock-hard football practice field behind the stands of Hormel Stadium. He'll start to have an identity. He'll start to have character."

Edmundson is hardly blind to the dangers of football and uses precise, evocative language to describe the brutal one-on-one drills he endured in high school. He makes adroit comparisons between "The Iliad" and the modern game and drills down on the conflicted relationship between football and war and religion by quoting an excellent modern novel, "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain:

"Why, please, do they play the national anthem before games anyway? The Dallas Cowboys and the Chicago Bears, these are two privately owned, for-profit corporations, these their contractual employees taking the field. As well play the national anthem at the top of every commercial, before every board meeting, with every deposit and withdrawal you make at the bank."

Injuries, race, entitlement ... Edmundson discusses them all, more briefly and with somewhat more subtlety than Almond. He comes full circle, 30 years later, when his son plays Pee Wee football. His son is nicknamed the Pit Bull. Howie Long, with a son on the same team, says the Pit Bull is "super tough." Edmundson is thrilled.

Michael Weinreb takes a different approach in "Season of Saturdays: A History of College Football in 14 Games." Snappy and well-written (all three of these books are lively reads), Weinreb zigs and zags through 145 years of football history using a handful of signature games as mileposts. He lingers on Walter Camp and Teddy Roosevelt, Amos Alonzo Stagg and Manti Te'o, Woody Hayes and Darrell Royal, Keith Jackson and Jimmy Johnson, Mike Leach and Mack Brown, and most personally for the author, a Penn State graduate, Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky.

Of special interest to Oregon fans is the contrast Weinreb draws between the Ducks and Alabama.

"Set them alongside each other, a nouveau riche Pacific coast clan of garishly dressed blue-state speedsters versus an institutional monarchy of crimson-clad conservative southerners, and it feels almost Gatsbyesque. So it goes in college football; it is a world in which everyone at the top is striving to transcend their circumstances, to engineer their own luck. But this is the inherent danger in a sport so tenuous, a sport where one loss can knock you out of the upper echelon, a sport whose practitioners are so young. Sometimes, insane (stuff) happens, and there's not a damn thing you can do to control it."